The FLI/FLC Animation Format

The FLI/FLC animation format, originally developed by
Autodesk, Inc
is sometimes more desirable than
the MPEG animation format, particularly for computer-generated animations,
as relatively large (640x480) movies can be played back at
reasonable speeds on X11 workstations, PCs and Macs.

If you are running a graphical Web browser and you want to view
these movies "on the fly", you probably will need to tell your
browser to recognize .fli and .flc extensions as MIME type video/fli,
and you will also need to tell the browser to use the appropriate FLI/FLC
player when it encounters type MIME type video/fli.

For example, if you are using an X windows browser, you need to first add
the following line to the file /usr/local/lib/mime.types or $HOME/.mimetypes:

video/flc flc fli

If you are serving FLI/FLC files, you should add the above line
to the mime.types
file in your httpd's conf directory so that the server can identify
FLI/FLC movies to browsers.
Then add the following line to /usr/local/lib/mailcap or $HOME/.mailcap:

# This maps all types of video *other than MPEG* to the viewer 'xanim'.
video/*; xanim %s

I sometimes compress FLC Files greater than 1 Mb with
UNIX compress or GNU's GZIP, both of which can be uncompressed
with GZIP .
If you are using X-windows Mosaic, the movies should uncompress on the fly.
Otherwise, you may need to select "load local", download the file,
then unzip or uncompress before viewing. If you are really bummed
about not being able to view these movies on the fly on your PC, let
me know and I'll change them back to their uncompressed form.

Also for DOS, I have used the versatile
DISPLAY program. It's a combination image and movie viewer,
splitter, transformer, you-name-it. Did I mention that it can
make FLI/FLC movies?

For Windows 95/98/NT, OS/2:

VideoMach
(formerly Fast Movie Processor) is a simple to use convertor that will
convert frames into .flc or formats like AVI, MPEG and others.

MainActor makes FLI/FLC, AVI, MPEG and converts between
different types with lots of supported CODECS.

For UNIX, get
PPM2FLI . This encodes FLC movies taking PPM, PGM, PBM
or FBM files as input, and also includes a FLC decoder to turn FLC
movies into individual images. If your movie frames are in some other
image format, like .gif or .pcx, you will also need the
NetPBM image conversion & manipulation programs .

If you are interested in a complete animation package (with modeling
and rendering tools) that generates FLI/FLC files, you might check out
Autodesk's
3D Studio VIZ.

If you are serving your FLC files up on the web, you might consider
installing
Klaus Ehrenfried's Java applet which can play
Fli/Flc animations within HTML pages without the need of plugins.